The present invention relates generally to telecommunications services, and more particularly, to methods, systems, and storage mediums for facilitating a billing point of interconnection arrangement in a telecommunications environment.
Incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) refer to well-established telecommunications service providers that have typically been in operation before the government-imposed deregulation laws were effectuated. Since that time, many competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) have attempted to gain market presence within the traditionally ILEC-controlled geographies. These CLECs incur significant costs associated with equipment installation and building new facilities necessary for conducting its telecommunications services. For start-up CLECs without adequate capital resources, these costs can be prohibitively significant. These competitors typically enter into agreements with ILECs for handling interconnection calling services, such as, for example, when a CLEC end user calls an ILEC end user whereby both the ILEC's and CLEC's equipment and transmission lines are accessed.
The physical interconnection point between the ILEC and CLEC networks is referred to as a point of interconnection (POI). When a CLEC negotiates a POI location at which to physically interconnect its network with that of the ILEC, it ideally desires to locate the POI as close as possible to its end office switch so that the distance between the end office and physical point of interconnection is minimal, thereby shifting the burden and costs of transmission to the ILEC. Obviously, the ILEC would prefer that the CLEC agree to locate the POI further into the ILEC network so that the ILEC is not required to handle an unfair portion of the total end-to-end transmission requirement.
What is needed, therefore, is a way for both the ILEC and CLEC to economically benefit and share, more equally, the costs associated with the completion of end user customer calls that traverse the physical point of interconnection between the ILEC and the CLEC networks.